Madagascar was not turning out to be the heaven I expected. I was on assignment here to report on drought relief and the prevention of starvation. A reporter and I were here to find out who was helping.

After a three-plus-hour ride in a van, we arrived in Ambovombe, a small town. Peter immediately headed over to the hospital to speak with a local doctor on our topics of interest. Since I didn’t need to photograph the background interview with the doctor, I decided to wander cut to the road and tried to look ordinary.

l raised my camera tentatively to get some images before the sun went down. These would be my first photos in the country. Would they duck and cover? Hiss and yell? Would they be pleased? Upset?

I photographed a handsome man who leaned against a wall in the golden light of dusk. No reaction. Ok. I took a breath. After a while, everyone within a 20-yard away had noticed me.

Soon a mother standing at the street, encouraged me to photograph her two young children. I hesitated a moment. They were dressed in dirty clothes. One of them might not even have any pants on-not because their parents were too careless, but because they could not afford them. Shoes were far beyond the means of money.

Their mother really wanted me to photograph them. This happens everywhere I go. I’ve taken this kind of photo of cute smiling children staring into my lens over and over. I don’t usually save the image for my photo files.

But I saved this one.

Why? The children’s mother. It’s something so powerful yet so common that we sometimes miss it. This mom despite all the disadvantages so obvious to an outsider’s eyes, found in her children something she wanted a photograph to remember. That was because she saw a different picture: She saw it with a mother’s heart As should we all.

Not long ago when I had a dinner party, a guest noticed the gravy boat (船形酱汁壶) — a piece of china, “Is it a heirloom (传家宝)?” The boat is very old, matches nothing else, and has a V-shaped cut on it. But it is the one I will keep forever.

Our history together began fifty years ago when I was seven. That December the river started to rise. We worked hard against the disaster and even kept a rowboat downstairs. My mother carefully packed the china in the study upstairs because it’d been her mother’s and was valuable to her. She told me, “You must treasure the things people you love have treasured. It keeps you in touch with them.” But then I didn’t really understand her concern.

The water rose higher. One night, the floor of the study fell through and the china was on the first floor under the rising river. The loss really broke her heart. That night she sat on the top of the stairs and cried.

The next morning I could tell how bad she still felt. Suddenly I saw the rowboat —yes, I could fish for the china. I put a hook (钩) onto a line, let it down until I felt it hit bottom and slowly moved the rowboat back and forth, pulling my line, but time after time I pulled the line up empty.

When we had to leave as the water poured in, I tried for the last time. Suddenly I felt something and raised my catch. The gravy boat! The moment I took it out in front of my mother, she was in tears of joy.

It was just then that I realized how deeply that old gravy boat connected me to the people and places of my past, tying me to my mother as well as her life, her joy and her love.

After most people complete their undergraduate degree, they either take a break or jump into a job. Few, like Brianna Craft, set out to save the world.

It started when she was a freshman sitting in an environmental studies class in 2006. Craft was shocked when the professor described the harm climate change was having on people. She records the moment in her new book, Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir.

After graduation, Craft spent a year in AmeriCorps, focusing on protecting the environment. AmeriCorps is an organization connecting individuals and organizations to help communities tackle their toughest challenges. “That helped me figure out that my future was not in doing science,” she says. Instead, she wanted to work with people and policy.

She then had an opportunity to attend the UN climate negotiations (磋商). That, in turn, prepared her for her current role as a senior researcher at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Her focus is to ensure that the lowest contributors to greenhouse gases and those most affected by climate change have a voice in international climate negotiations.

For five years, Craft attended and supported climate conferences around the world, leading to the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015. Craft says, “I wanted people to care about the work I did in the climate negotiations, and why we pushed so hard to form this agreement.” That led her to write Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir.

Craft brings the viewpoint of an African American woman from a rural northwest community. She weaves (编织) together several storylines-including her difficult childhood with an irresponsible parent, her self-discovery in college and her work to help work towards climate agreements and ensure that even the smallest countries have a voice.